Two words that I hate: placemaking and vibrant. Yet I constantly hear these buzzwords in urban planning and design, public art and arts funding, often paired, implying that the first invariably leads to the second. Although I would be happy to blame Richard Florida’s “Creative Class” thesis (see my previous ARC keyword) for popularizing them, this definition of “successful” urban spaces has a much longer history. Both words can be traced back to the 1960s, a key moment in American urbanism, when a new set of values appeared that inverted the dominant view of cities.

Listening to speakers during the Creative Time Summit today, a keyword emerged that was not so much repeated throughout the afternoon (like “vibrant” or “grassroots,” both of which deserve more attention and analysis) but present through the presentations’ modes and priorities: demonstrate.

In this list of terms, I’m particularly interested in dislocation. Unlike “art” and “place,” which I think of as solid nouns and things in the world, “dislocation” invokes the action of dislocating. I wonder about the obscured verb’s subject, object, and their relation. Is what I experience as urban flux, mobility and vibrancy always also the cause of dislocation for someone else? Can there be movement without displacement?

I think it is so interesting to see Creative Time take questions of artistic social engagement to issues of place and creativity in urban and regional planning. In my own work, I find that these streams of thinking and making are strangely un-aligned, often talking past each other. Socially-engaged art expands the parameters of visual and performing art practice. Sometimes this work seeks to explore relationality as such; sometimes this work is connected to a fairly explicit social justice mission.

In his 2012 article, “Placemaking and the Politics of Belonging and Dis-Belonging,” Robert Bedoya writes: “What I’ve witness [sic] in the discussion s and practices associated with Creative Placemaking is that they are tethered to a meaning of ‘place’ manifest in the built environment….” Further, Bedoya asserts, “its insufficiency lies in a lack of understanding that before you have places of belonging, you must feel you belong. Before there is the vibrant street one need an understanding of the social dynamics of the street – the politics of belonging and dis-belonging at work in placemaking in civil society.”

Two Eiffel Towers stand in nearly identical proportions in vastly different locales. Their embodied histories and the meanings they signify are highly divergent. So are the symbolic and material relations to those who live in their vicinity. What does the Tianducheng’s Eiffel Tower replica connote? How is it approached on-the-ground by those who live daily in the shadow as well as those displaced residents moved for its construction?

An artist organizes a political rally about a local issue. The project, which is supported by a local arts center in a medium-size city, fails to attract many local residents; only a couple dozen people show up, most of whom work at the arts center. The event is documented on video and presented as part of an exhibition. In truth, the artist can claim to have organized a rally?” This is one of the provocative questions that Pablo Helguera raises in his bookEducation for Socially Engaged Art.

On October 12, the Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley and the Graduate Program in Curatorial Practice at the California College of the Arts partnered to host a live-streaming of the Creative Time Summit. This annual conference in New York brings together cultural producers–including artists, critics, writers, and curators–to discuss how their work engages pressing issues affecting our world. Summit themes this year included Inequities, Occupations, Making, and Tactics. Keynote speakers included Pablo Helguera, Martha Rosler, Tom Finkelpearl, and Slavoj Žižek.

Gutter punks act as both an ideal and a marginalized group within the consistently paradoxical subculture that is punk. They exemplify the values of punk by living as a physical marker of anti-authority and are considered part of the vagabond, vagrant, homeless population by the Main Street eye. “Vagabonds throughout history have been seen as ‘indeterminate’ in the sense that they do not exist in fixed social or spatial locations” but are constantly somewhere in the visual public regions of and between cities (Amster, pp. 3).

Humans have invented more things than we can count throughout our history, but none has had so much impact on life as one of our first inventions – the plan. Manifesting as business plans, battle tactics, essay outlines, and who knows what else, the concept of a plan has more or less defined the progression of human civilization since its invention, for better and worse. On one hand, plans have given us some of my favorite things in life: video games, science, space exploration, and more of the like.

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The Arts Research Center at University of California, Berkeley is a think tank for the arts, a genuinely interdisciplinary space that brings people together--from across the university and beyond the university, from across the arts and beyond the arts--for unexpected conversations, collaborations, and community-building.